I offered my take on David Sparks’s no journal. David later followed up, and several other people chimed in, too. Shawn Blanc’s take really hit home for me:

… since I began working for myself over six months ago, I’ve found that keeping a No Journal / Not-To-Do List populated is significantly more difficult. The reason, I think, is that now all of my incoming tasks and priorities are self-initiated. They are my own ideas and goals and dreams. Assessing and prioritizing those is much more difficult because I’m already biased to do all of them thanks to the very nature of their origin.

Now mix in the constant rain of email and other external sources of ambiguous might-be-worth-doing tasks, and this gets at the heart of why modern knowledge work is so difficult.

It’s not enough to do work. Anyone can work. Successful knowledge workers are as good at deciding what to work on as they are working on it.

It’s hard—really f’ing hard—to be a worker, middle manager, and CEO all in one brain. I would be outright lying if I said I was good at. The times I feel most successful at it are the times I force myself to do really high-level strategic reviews—not the kind you can script into a recurring project.

I find that the more often I make time to think about what I'm doing from the perspective of a CEO, the quality of what I do in each “business unit” of my life goes up.

There’s this saying in golf: “There are no pictures on the score card.”

Translated to writing, you might say “They never see your drafts."

In the context of software development, “No one looks at your code."

Pretty processes aren’t a prerequisite to pretty outcomes. Make elegance a virtue of your product, not your path.

Some projects are simple and linear. Getting them done is just a matter of jotting some steps and checking them off.

But many projects aren’t clear. They depend on

• The actions of other people
• The timing of future events
• The result of future project steps and research
• The impact of competing projects and shifting priorities
• The whims of bosses and clients
• “Unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know” —Donald Rumsfeld1

For many projects, it’s simply impossible—and certainly not productive—to map out every step start to finish.

So I don’t try. Instead, I use actions to evaluate, decide, then plan additional tasks. For example, in a project with forking paths, I’ll first list as many known steps as I can, then I’ll create a series of actions like

1. “Evaluate option 1”
2. “Evaluate option 2”
3. “Evaluate option 3”
4. “Decide which option is best”
5. “Create tasks based on chosen option”

The last one is the most important. In situations where it’s not even clear what I’m evaluating, or if it’s simply impossible to know what will come after a certain step, I’ll make sure that the final action is a reminder to make more actions.2

In a system like OmniFocus, which encourages one to work out of contexts and perspectives, I think it’s critical that all active projects have a next step. It might be scheduled for the future, but it needs to exist.

It's not your software's fault that projects without next actions vanish. It's just how the world works. Either know where you're going, or know that you need to figure out where you're going.

Not long ago, everything was humming along normally here at PE until I started noticing some odd errors in the WordPress dashboard. They would come and go but didn’t seem too serious.

I decided to have a chat with my trusty web host admin—who happens to be a good friend. It was a fairly calm conversation until he said this:

Databases started disappearing 10 minutes ago.

very bad news

I’m dumping the whole database server out right now, but already lost a few

how’s your backup situation?

In other words, “this is not a drill.” Cue the standing neck hairs.

That last line should ring in your head

How is your backup situation? Well?

Do you have backups? Yes? Okay, well, have you looked lately to make sure the snazzy automated-and-archive-so-you-don’t-have-to-touch-it-or-see-it gem is actually still running? Or did it get quietly assassinated in the night by last month’s platform upgrade?

Have you checked to see whether the backups produced by your system are usable? Have you even practiced restoring them?

Are you backing up everything you would really need in the event of a total system (not just data) loss?

Boom!

You don’t know when disaster will strike, but you should assume it will be at a most inopportune and unexpected time. Perfect data storms can form at a moment’s notice. And sometimes thunder claps in a blue sky.

Being a little scared on a recurring basis is useful.

I was OK

Fortunately I had good, regular, and recent backups, so getting my database back up and running went well. But I’m a little more fearful about all of my data now. And I’m glad.

No matter how pretty a calendar interface may be, it's always easier to just tell the calendar, in plain English, what you want. QuickCal makes it really easy. Instead of flipping through days, weeks, and months in iCal, BusyCal, or Google Calendar, you can just tell QuickCal the what, when, and where. It takes care of the rest.

They've got an iPhone app, too. So much better than spinning a wheel a la Showcase Showdown every time I need to pick a date.

Brett Kelly has a huge one in his pants. I mean big. Thick and leathery, too.

His wallet is enormous, and he has some solid tips for recovering information in a lost wallet using—wait for it—Evernote.

I stopped carrying a foldable filing cabinet several years ago. Aside from no longer viewing the world at a 10-degree pitch or looking like I walked out in the middle of a Brazilian butt lift, not carrying a big wallet has the added benefit of never losing a big wallet.

Instead, I carry just a few things in a money clip:

• 2 credit cards (one for dining rewards; one for everything else)
• an ATM card
• my driver’s license
• some cash

That’s it. Sure I still need the stuff I used to carry, but it’s 2011. I have Evernote, Simplenote, and 1Password now.

• Evernote holds my insurance cards and miscellaneous scans of other things
• 1Password securely holds additional credit card numbers, my flexible spending account, etc.
• Simplenote has my plain text notes—the kinda stuff I might’ve written on a cocktail napkin in the pre-smartphone world.

What about those pesky customer loyalty cards, you ask? I usually just give the cashier my home phone number, which is tied to my card.1

Mail 5 in Lion is the first app that’s caused me to spend significant time away from the Gmail web interface since I first fell in love with Gmail. What I thought would be a temporary fling has become a permanent affair.

There are lots of things I really like about Mail 5, but search is probably at the top of the list. It’s as fast as thought and extremely smart with the way it detects dates and names.

Just the other day, through experimentation, I discovered that I can exclude results by adding a dash in front of search terms (like a Google search).

For example, adding -linkedin to a normal mail search excludes all of the LinkedIn spam I’ve let accumulate in my archive.

Let me know about other Mail 5 search tricks you come across.

(h/t to my buddy, elasticthreads, for nudging me toward Mail 5 earlier this year.)

A few of you sounded interested in where my iCloud calendar experiment might be headed, so I thought I would keep you posted.

The original purpose

I’ve been a Google Calendar user for years. My only complaint with Google Calendar is that it is, like all Google services, tied to an email address. When someone sends a meeting invitation to an address other than the one attached to my Google Calendar, accepting the request on an iOS device is difficult to impossible.

I wanted to see if iCloud would serve as a better standalone calendar solution.

Meeting request/acceptance

The first 24 hours with iCloud resulted in mostly negative progress from where I was with Google Calendar. iCloud didn’t seem to want to send any email notification when I invited others to a meeting.

Later, it started working. I think the problem had more to do with iCloud email glitches, which were being reported by others.

It’s been working fine the last few days.

My iCloud calendar email address

Once iCloud started sending email notifications for new meetings, I couldn’t figure out how to control the email address it was using. (Naturally, it was using an email address I didn’t want it to use.)

After much fiddling, mouth holding, and séance saying, I figured out that iCloud was using the email address associated with my Apple ID. This seemed odd since iCloud allows you to specify a different email address in iOS settings.

But sure enough, once I changed my Apple ID email address, iCloud began using that when generating meeting requests.

It’s worth noting that changing my Apple ID, of course, triggered all kinds of additional downstream taps because it meant I needed to sign out/in on all my Apple devices.

iSpammed. Much.

I saved the worst for last.

As I mentioned before, I imported my entire Google Calendar, with all its history, into iCal. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Until last Thursday night… when iCloud decided to re-send meeting acceptance emails to every single person on every meeting I’ve had in the last three years. I’m not the only one.

And I’m not just talking about meetings I organized. It emailed every bloody email address it found on every appointment. Hundreds of emails. Hundreds.

I’m still getting phone calls and “This is weird” replies from people wondering why I’m accepting meetings from 2008.

I have no idea why iCloud did this, but I'm hoping it was a one-time event.

It’s also a reminder why email is such a God-awful place for private information. It’s unnerving how little control you have when an email server goes rogue.

From here

iCloud sync is very fast and so far very reliable. It also feels cleaner not having to sync contacts and calendar appointments with Google on my Mac. In other words iCloud is working well aside from the aforementioned snafus.

At the risk of sounding like an iCloud apologist, I’m going to stick with iCloud for now and hope I’m past the turbulence. The fasten seat belt sign is still on, though.

You ordered a side of soup. They gave you fries. You like fries. You eat the fries.

The farther you are above the poverty line, the more likely you are not to pursue reparations that clink in a piggy bank. The justification: it’s not worth your time.

From a purely rational economic standpoint, that’s probably true. Your time is worth $X per hour, and it would take Y too many hours to pursue, where Y × X is too big to measure in nickels and dimes.

There’s another view worth considering.

Every time you get stiffed, whether it’s because your cable provider raised your monthly bill by $1.19 or because a gas pump said you put 20.7 gallons in your 20-gallon tank, it’s an opportunity. A drill.

It’s a chance to practice one of the most valuable skills anyone can possess: knowing how to ask for what you want. And getting it more often than not.

The immediate dollar value of righting a tiny little wrong is small, but the downstream payoff can be immense if you get good at it. And by good, I mean comfortable.

Today it’s about $1.05. One day it could be about $1.05 million. Practice may not make perfect, but it usually makes money.

In iOS 5's notification center, swipe weather left to right to show a daily forecast.

See all one-line tips.

I was really intrigued when I heard about David Sparks’s “no journal”. In his words:

Every time you find yourself having to say no because of how many commitments you have, write it down. I started doing that and looking at the things I was saying no to… and then weighing those against the things I was saying yes to.

It was his own clever MacSparkian way of staying focused on the creation of his latest book, iPad at Work.

Honestly, I don’t think I could ever keep up with a no journal because I usually fail at any kind of regimented journaling.

I’ve learned that saying no is extremely important, though. And it only gets more important (and harder) the more successful and productive you become.

The more you accomplish, the more you prove to yourself and the world that you can do anything. And you can… do anything.

But you can’t do everything. No is about constructively doing less.

No also gets easier to say once you realize that no is only negative on the surface. Underneath it's powerfully affirmative. Saying no means repeatedly saying yes—to the things you've decided matter more.

Yes feels really, really good.

Earlier this year, Merlin Mann and a few other folks more progressive than I were creating a buzz around Huffduffer. For whatever reason, I didn’t pay much attention—until now.

Huffduffer is kinda like Instapaper for podcasts. Ever want to listen to a single episode of a show but not subscribe to the show? Yes? Then Huffduffer is for you. It lets you create your own custom podcast feed.

Huffduffer is so easy to set up and use even a non-geek could do it. Srsly.

1. Grab a free account at huffduffer.com
2. Drag the ‘Huffduff it’ bookmarklet to your browser’s Bookmarks Bar [1]
3. Subscribe to your custom feed in an app like Instacast (my fave)

To add podcast episodes, just go to the episode’s web page and click your ‘Huffduff it’ bookmarklet.

As you add episodes, they’ll appear in your custom feed.

When Katie Floyd mentioned that she was having a hard time working Google+ into her life, I felt better.

I’m struggling with it, too. I’ve done nearly nothing there since signing up.

I don’t deny that Google+ has a lot of potential or that it’s better than Facebook or that it fills a niche that wasn’t already filled. I just can’t make it a priority right now, and I honestly feel kinda bad about that.

New people follow me on Google+ nearly every day it seems, and some people have said some really nice things about PE posts there. I feel like a jerk for not responding to Google+ feedback like I normally do on Twitter, which is really the only “social network” I visit regularly anymore.

Don’t interpret my Google+ non-presence in a bad way. I may get there eventually, but I just haven’t figured out how—yet.

It seems that everyone has gone location crazy with the arrival of iOS 5. And for good reason.

I’m already enjoying the new Reminders app and how it can tell me to take my trash to the road the moment I get home from work. Dave Caolo really likes it, too (reminders, not my household sanitation).

Even OmniFocus for iPhone now allows location-triggered reminders.[1]

And speaking of the OmniGroup, they’ve helped clear up one of my biggest concerns with using location-aware tasks: how much battery life is that always-there GPS icon costing me?

If you have an iPhone 4 or 4S, the news is good:

… the iPhone 4 (and 4S) include a feature called “region monitoring”, which lets them track the devices’ location via GPS without running down the battery. iPad 2 models with 3G also have this capability. Unfortunately, devices released before then don’t have a low-power way to monitor their location as accurately, so they won’t be able to use this type of reminder in OmniFocus. (The Reminders app included in iOS 5 has the same limitation.)

How dare I doubt Apple.

(h/t to Eric Beavers)

Dr. Drang has good things to say about JotNot, an app that turns your iPhone into a document scanner. I really like Scanner Pro, which is very similar to JotNot. I use Scanner Pro nearly every week to convert paper to PDF when I'm away from a conventional scanner. The quality is incredibly good.